ELEVATE IS HERE!
Elevate Board Paper quality
without endless rework
Writing skills aren't enough.
What if you could get out of the weeds and focus on the insights?
Doing so means diving more deeply into communication strategy and thinking structure.
Clarify and convey quality insights
that engage decision-makers
All leaders seek to communicate strategically, yet few enjoy preparing papers and presentations.
Papers frequently come together in a mad scramble, often out of hours as everyone wades through a sea of tracked changes. This leads senior leaders and company secretaries too often pulling all-nighters to finish on time.
Davina Stanley shares a framework for breaking this ugly cycle in her two practical new books, one for leaders one for authors.
Both books are loaded with real-world examples to help you communicate more strategically:
– > Elevate sets you up to lift the quality of thinking in your team's board papers without rewriting them yourself.
It offers a four-step framework to help you lead your team to clarify and structure their thinking more efficiently, ideally (mostly!) during work hours. It highlights how valuable your insights are as a leader. Your team's ability to prepare powerful papers and presentations for senior forums requires you to inject your strategic insights sooner than you might think.
– > Engage provides your team with the skills they need to map their messaging onto a single insightful page that you can review in a heartbeat.
Engage aligns directly with Elevate, explaining the steps your team members can take to collaborate with you on high-quality messaging. It brings the Elevate framework to life by explaining how it works in line with communication strategy example after example, all derived from direct experience.
Easy-reading books, both are packed with communication strategy examples stemming from decades helping leaders communicate better.
ELEVATE IS HERE!
THE REVIEWS ARE IN ...
Elevate and Engage help you prepare communication that you and your Board can be proud of.Before I read Elevate, preparing board papers was a chore.
Davina Stanley has opened my eyes to the great opportunity to not only build my team's capability, but also efficiently extract enormous value from the board reporting process.
I highly commend this focused and practical guide. It should be the standard approach adopted by organisations everywhere.
You provide a really clear and concise roadmap to quality board presentations and the methodologies needed to get the best team results.
Elevate is an engaging, punchy and pragmatic book that will help you communicate better.
It reminds us all to get to the very heart of the matter, and to think of communication as a valued corporate competence and source of competitive advantage.
Implementing its invaluable lessons will encourage more insightful thinking and inevitably deliver real commercial value to your organisation.
This guide is so effective for teaching and embedding more powerful communication within a team.
Elevate is enjoyable and easy to read with relatable stories of the all too familiar and painful paper review cycles.
I love Davina’s practical advice for how to break unproductive patterns to save time and to empower leaders and contributors.
Her detailed workshop schedule and metrics to track tangible improvement are so valuable. Her book is now required reading in my team!
Davina Stanley really knows what is going on in organization when it comes to writing. She gives the most realistic description I have ever seen of the ‘chain of pain’ of having to deal with endless revisions full of Word’s ‘track changes’.
That means that she, as no other, can offer help to all those struggling writers out there. The book is full of useful instruments that not only speed up the writing process, but that will also lead to better decision making.
Davina Stanley really knows what is going on in organization when it comes to writing: she gives the most realistic description I have ever seen of the ‘chain of pain’ of having to deal with endless revisions full of Word’s ‘track changes’.
That means that she, as no other, can offer help to all those struggling writers out there: the book is full of useful instruments that not only speed up the writing process, but that will also lead to better decision making.
In Elevate and Engage you will discover ...
» How to introduce the approach to your team (Elevate) and into your own personal practice (Engage)
» Strategies for delivering and receiving an effective brief that positions the paper within its strategic context
» How to iterate quickly around the key messages early in your preparation process
» 10 narrative patterns to help jump-start your thinking. Engage also includes case studies for each one.
» Tools, templates and communication strategy examples sprinkled throughout to help you and your team
Author – Davina Stanley
I love what I do.
I help senior leaders and their teams prepare high-quality papers and presentations in a fraction of the time.
This involves ‘nailing' the message that will quickly engage decision makers in the required outcome.
I leverage 25+ years' experience that includes …
- learning structured thinking techniques at McKinsey in Hong Kong in the mid 1990s before coaching and training their teams globally as a freelancer for a further 15 years
- being approved to teach the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto in 2009
- helping CEOs, C-suite leaders and their reports deeply understand their stakeholder needs and communicate more strategically as a result
- seeing leaders cut the number of times they review major papers by ~30% and teams cut the amount of time they take to prepare major papers by up to ~40%*
- watching senior meetings focus on substantive discussions that generate better decisions, rather than trying to clarify the issue.
My approach helps anyone who needs to engage senior leaders and Boards.
Recent clients include 7Eleven, KPMG, Mercer, Meta, Woolworths.
(*) Numbers are based on 2023 client benchmarking results after ~8 weeks of working with me in a group to build their own communication strategy example.
ENGAGE COMING SOON